by Graham Brack
‘I know,’ Slonský said gently. ‘But I’d draw a distinction between people who were just trying to do their job and those who enjoyed beating people up, wouldn’t you?’
Holub eyed Slonský suspiciously as if trying to determine whether this was a veiled challenge before deciding it was a valid argument. ‘I knew plenty of those. I wasn’t one of them, though.’
‘I didn’t say you were. Was Mrázek handy with his fists?’
‘He wasn’t the worst, but he liked to give people a couple of taps to check they were taking him seriously. The bloke who died wasn’t actually treated that badly. He wasn’t given food or drink and we threatened him a bit, maybe slapped him a few times, but we didn’t use a baton on him or anything like that. That’s why we took him to the Red House, where we could have been more physical.’
‘Tell me more about the Red House. We’ve found a body in its grounds, and I’m curious to know why the murderer dumped her there. It’s as if it meant something to him, because he took quite a chance taking her there.’
‘You think he may have been beaten up there?’
‘It crossed my mind. I know it’s been nearly twenty years since the place was last used, but someone who was twenty or thirty then could be the man we’re looking for.’
Holub signalled the waiter to refill his cup, so Slonský did likewise.
‘The Red House had two busy periods,’ explained Holub. ‘It was used a lot before the Prague Spring, especially in the fifties, then it went quiet during the reforms. It was only really in the seventies when the regime thought they were secure enough to start stamping out dissidents that it came back into fashion. Between, say, 1970 and 1975 the place saw a lot of activity, or so I heard. But after that we only took the occasional person there.’
‘What does “occasional” mean? One a week? One a month?’
‘There might be three or four inmates at a time. We’d soften them up, then when we’d finished with them we’d hand them back to the ordinary police.’
‘What about the ones who died?’
‘What do you mean, the ones who died?’
‘Exactly that. We know there were bodies buried in the grounds of the Red House. Do you know who they could be?’
Holub shook his head vigorously. ‘I never knew that to happen. I mean, people died, but generally they were sent for cremation straight away. The one who died in front of us we just returned to the police station because there was hardly a mark on him.’
Slonský decided to take Holub into his confidence. ‘The odd thing about the case I’m working on is that the dead woman was laid to rest on top of someone else’s grave. I’m assuming there won’t be records anywhere telling me who was underneath, so my best bet is finding someone who remembers the incident.’
‘If I could help, I would,’ Holub replied. ‘It wouldn’t do me any harm in the eyes of the Probation Officer. But I can honestly say I never knew anyone buried in the grounds.’
‘Do you have any idea why it might have happened?’
Holub sipped his coffee as he reflected. ‘It would be someone they didn’t want to admit having had in the first place. Someone who would have had people looking for him.’
‘But then there’d be a fuss if he didn’t reappear, surely?’
‘Not necessarily. Towards the end of the Communist years, people were bolder, but in the seventies sometimes dissidents slipped over the border and didn’t want anyone to know where they were in case it put their remaining families at risk. They’d go ahead to find a safe place then send for their wives and children.’
‘Okay, I can remember that happening occasionally.’
‘But sometimes a while would elapse before they could get a message to the family, who would naturally not be drawing attention to the fact that their man had gone in case he hadn’t yet crossed the border. So it could be some weeks or months before they realised something must have gone wrong. And all that mattered to the StB was that nothing could be pinned on them, so if they just said they knew nothing about it, who could prove them wrong?’
‘That means they must have managed to arrest someone without it coming to anyone’s attention.’
‘That’s not impossible. We didn’t always kick doors in at two in the morning, you know.’
Slonský smiled ruefully. ‘It seemed to me that I did. You didn’t get a lot of sleep as a junior officer back then.’
‘People think we did it all the time, but the main reason for doing it was that they would be at home. If we could find them earlier in the day we’d arrest them then, especially if we could take them by surprise. We’d quite often arrest artistic types as they left the theatre or ballet, because they weren’t expecting it and they might well have had a few drinks. I nicked a footballer in the dressing room after he’d been substituted because he was there on his own.’
Slonský debated whether he could take Holub into his confidence a little further, but was taken by surprise when Holub suddenly asked a direct question.
‘Anyway, you keep saying the body was a woman. No woman ever worked in the Red House, and I don’t remember more than one or two being taken there, so what connection could there be?’
‘She’s the daughter of a former high-ranking StB officer.’
Holub called for another coffee and stirred it slowly as he thought. ‘So you think she was killed in revenge for something he did?’
‘Not necessarily, but until I find a better motive for someone to kill her that seems the favourite to me. Obviously the Red House is important to the killer. It seems likely that her father worked in the Red House. So in the absence of any other clear motive, that’s the one I have to run with. I haven’t closed my mind to others — but in any crime, you investigate the bit that stands out and makes it different.’
Holub gulped back a mouthful of coffee. ‘Are you going to tell me who it is?’
‘It’ll be in the papers soon enough, I suppose. She’s the daughter of General Rezek.’
‘Rezek? Is he still alive? I wish you luck. You won’t be short of people who wanted him dead. But why not kill him? Why his daughter?’
‘I don’t know,’ Slonský replied. ‘And I’m not even sure I’m right in the first place. Nor do I know why he’s waited this long to take his revenge, and until I can answer those questions I don’t have much of a case. Until I know whose body was in that grave with her, I don’t know where to start looking.’
‘Can’t you get those clever fellows at the medical school to reconstruct the face from the skull?’
‘I could, if I had a skull. The first body was taken away, presumably when the second one was left.’
Holub sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. Things were much simpler in my day. Dead people stayed where they were put.’
‘They usually do these days too. This is a new one on me.’ Slonský fished in his wallet and handed over a couple of banknotes. ‘This is for your time. If you remember anything that might give me a steer on that body, I’d be grateful for a call.’
Holub accepted the notes and tucked them carefully in a pocket. ‘I wouldn’t normally take money off a policeman, but times aren’t easy.’
‘I know. Whatever you did, you’ve paid for it. I’m as happy as anyone else to see offenders put away but once they’ve served their sentence, they need a chance to start again. And they usually don’t get it in this country.’
Holub frowned. ‘This grave — where was it?’
‘Near the south wall, where the hothouse used to be.’
‘I might be able to give you a bit of help. I think there may have been something under the ground there when I first went there in 1973. We had some dogs, and I remember they used to kick up when they were taken to that area. I once asked what was spooking them, and my sergeant said some questions are better not asked.’
‘Is he still around?’
‘No idea. Name of Jelínek. If he’s still alive he must be into his eighties or even older.�
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‘First name?’
Holub smiled for the first time. ‘In my day you didn’t address sergeants by their first name. I’ve no idea.’
Navrátil and Krob were not having much luck. There were very few security cameras on the roads leading to the Red House, and those that existed were uninformative. It was boring work, because forty-eight hours of video footage from each camera takes around forty-eight hours to watch, and even if it was run at a faster speed there was a limit imposed by the ability of the eye to take it all in.
It was not until tape eleven that Krob found something. A van came into view with a carpet on the roof. The driver could not be seen clearly, partly because he was driving around shortly before midnight with sunglasses on, but Krob was able to get a registration number for the vehicle.
Krob called for Navrátil to check his findings and was instructed to look at the vehicle licensing database to get the name and address of the owner. Krob did so, and came back to Navrátil’s desk looking perplexed.
‘It belongs to Prague City Council,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those electric street-cleaning cars.’
‘I didn’t think they could go that quick,’ Navrátil replied.
‘They can’t, when they’re cleaning. They’re restricted to about twelve kilometres per hour. But when the brushes are retracted, they can manage normal car speeds.’
‘Call TSK and see where that vehicle is now. There may be some forensic material on it, so we need to get it out of service.’
Krob rang TSK, which was the company tasked with cleaning Prague’s streets. Technically, it was not the City Council, but a company wholly owned by the City Council, though Krob was not clear what real difference that might make. Within ten minutes they rang back to say that they had tracked that vehicle down and it was returning to base in Prague’s Ninth District. Krob copied down the address and he and Navrátil drove out to look it over.
Krob had taken a copy of the screen shot showing the van with the carpet on top.
‘I don’t understand,’ said the depot manager. ‘Why would one of our vehicles be out at that time of night?’
‘We assume it had been borrowed,’ Navrátil explained. ‘But wasn’t it missed?’
The manager leafed through the work log. ‘There you are,’ he said, pointing to an entry. ‘Unit 46 was discovered to be flat in the morning, but this was explained because the charging point had not been turned on.’
‘Wouldn’t that be unusual?’ Navrátil persisted.
‘Almost unknown. It’s a routine action. At the end of the day the vehicles are parked by their chargers and the staff walk along plugging them in and turning them on. I’ve never known one to miss one before. But why not just plug it in and charge it again?’
Krob had an idea about that. ‘Maybe there wasn’t time to fully charge it, which would have caused some questions to be asked. It would be much easier to give the impression that it had never been charged in the first place.’
Navrátil was more concerned about a different point. ‘Aren’t your vehicles locked away at night?’ he asked.
‘Who would want to steal a street-cleaning machine? They’re not exactly the go-to vehicle for joyriders. They’re behind a barrier arm, but I suppose you could just drive up onto the grass and leave by driving round the barrier.’
‘You might want to reconsider your security arrangements,’ Navrátil suggested. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll have to take Unit 46 out of service while our forensic technicians examine it.’
The depot manager winced. ‘We hosed them all down on Friday evening,’ he said. ‘But of course you’re welcome to do whatever you need.’
For once Slonský did not ask Mucha to track down Jelínek. This was partly due to his secretive nature, but mainly to the fact that Mucha was having a few days’ leave. Slonský was not a great lover of leave, because there was nowhere he would rather be than at work, unless he could find someone prepared to pay him to sit in bars, but he accepted that even Mucha was entitled to a few days now and again. If only he had a telephone number for Mucha’s wife’s sister, because he could be sure that if the Evil Witch of Kutná Hora dropped in for a visit Mucha would find an urgent reason why he needed to go to work again.
Slonský knocked politely on the door of the Human Resources Department. For once he was visiting during office hours, in defiance of his usual practice, which was to turn up when everyone had gone home. This was possible because the Duty Sergeants had a key in their safe that allowed access to these sensitive records in case of fire. One lunchtime Slonský took that key for a little walk to a nearby locksmith, and it returned with a twin brother which was currently taped to the underside of Krob’s desk. To Slonský’s way of thinking, the problem with requesting information from HR through official channels was that until he had a squint at the files he had no idea whether they had information that would justify all the form-filling that he would have to do. It was much more efficient to take a peek himself, then when he knew exactly what he wanted he could ask for it and save the HR staff some time by only requesting those particular files.
In this case, he explained to the clerk who admitted him that he was looking for contact details for a former staff member called Jelínek.
‘When did he retire?’ the clerk asked.
‘I don’t know exactly, but around twenty years ago. He was still working in 1973 if that helps.’
‘It doesn’t really. Do you know his rank?’
‘Sergeant. In 1973, that is.’
‘And the Directorate in which he worked?’
‘StB.’
The clerk stiffened. ‘We don’t actually have the StB records here.’
‘No, but when a company is sold to another company the staff go with it, right?’
‘Yes…’
‘So presumably the staff records go with the staff?’
‘Yes, normally…’
‘So if the StB is absorbed into the ordinary police, the police would need access to StB records?’
‘Yes. I can see where this is leading,’ the clerk replied. ‘We don’t have the records themselves, but we do have access to the catalogue that tells us whether we have any records, though I can’t promise we can share them.’
‘Splendid. That would be a great start,’ Slonský exclaimed enthusiastically.
‘I’ll have to use the terminal in the back office,’ the clerk said. ‘Access is restricted for obvious reasons.’
‘Of course,’ said Slonský, who had been musing to himself whether a nocturnal visit would serve any purpose given that the chances were that the files were protected with a password, and it was unlikely to be 1234 as on his own little-used terminal.
The clerk took his notepad and left Slonský alone. Alone, that is, except for the computer terminal that he had been using and on which he remained logged in. It was the work of a moment for Slonský to see if he could improve his computing knowledge by successfully calling up his own personnel record. To his surprise, it was quite easy. All he needed to do was to type his surname in the box marked “Surname”, because there were no other Slonskýs past or present in the police files, and in no time he was browsing his own profile.
He had previously done some judicious editing of the disciplinary section of his paper file, so there was no advantage in changing any of that, but the idea came to him that he might be able to ease the strain that he was feeling as a result of approaching the retirement age of 63 by making a small change to the record. Where his date of birth ended in 1947, he carefully moved the cursor across and altered it to 1949. When he had done so, a helpful little box jumped up to warn him to save his change before leaving; not only that, it was kind enough to let him know that he could do so by hitting the F10 key. Slonský tried hitting the F, the 1 and the 0, but that did not seem to work; but in a triumph of customer service, the program had anticipated this possibility and another little box showed him where the F10 key was. By the time the clerk returned, Slonský was
two years younger and the terminal had been returned to the main menu.
‘I think this may be your man,’ the clerk announced, pushing an index card towards Slonský.
‘Jelínek, Bohumil, born 28 March 1922, Senior Sergeant, StB, until 1985. Sounds like a good start. Is he still alive?’
‘I hope so, because we’re paying him a pension,’ the clerk simpered.
‘Then this must be his current address,’ Slonský decided, and copied it into his notebook. He bounded down the stairs feeling very pleased with himself and decided to celebrate his two lost birthdays with a cream cake somewhere.
Chapter 8
Jerneková was scathing about Adalheid Rezeková’s underwear drawer. ‘These cannot be comfortable,’ she remarked. ‘The things women wear to please men.’
‘So far as we know, she didn’t have a man,’ said Peiperová, ‘so we have to conclude she wore these for herself.’
‘In my books, underwear is there to hold everything in and keep it where you put it,’ Jerneková replied. She held up a lavender lace thong. ‘This is more like trying to carry jelly in a string bag.’
‘We’re not here to appraise her fashion choices,’ Peiperová snapped. ‘Keep your eyes open for anything that may help with our enquiries. In particular, let’s look for a diary and any letters.’
Peiperová had been well trained. However sloppy or casual Slonský might appear to be, he was a meticulous and diligent searcher, and he had passed these characteristics on to his juniors. They approached searching rather differently, Navrátil preferring to conduct a quick skim of the premises first and then concentrate his efforts once he knew what he was dealing with, whereas Peiperová worked more slowly but concluded each room before starting the next. It was the first time Jerneková had been detailed to conduct a search, and Peiperová was concerned that she might overlook something in her haste to find useful material.